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Does God’s law require us to own a gun? – Episode 008

logoOn today’s radio show, Bill Heid and Brian Brawdy interview Joel McDurmon, contributor to AmericanVision.org and author of four books, including, “God versus Socialism”. Also, whether or not Christians MUST own firearms in order to comply with God’s law.


Off The Grid Radio
Ep008
Released: August 6, 2010

Welcome to off the grid ready to, better ideas to bust you and your family out of today’s global control grid. Now here’s today’s show.

Brian: Welcome once again to Off the Grid News and the Off the Grid News the radio version of our show. I’m Brian Brawdy here as always with Mr. Bill Heid. Bill how are you today?

Bill: Brian, I’ve never been better in my life.

Brian: And you’re smiling when you say that so I believe you.

Bill: I’m feeling great, it’s good to be here with you and I’m very excited to have our guest with us today. He’s someone that I’ve known for a while and we’re going to bring a lot to the table here with this interview.

Brian: Well you know what I’ve said before and one of my favorite quotes is that an hour across the table from a wise man or a wise woman is worth a year’s study in books. And most certainly this guest this morning is that wise man Bill. We get to spend an hour with Joel McDurmon, he has a Masters of Divinity from the Reformed Episcopal Theological Seminary and is the director of a pretty cool website, the director of research for American Visions — a beautiful looking website as I know you know Bill beautiful looking website. He has authored four books including a manifested in the flesh how the historical evidence of Jesus refutes modern mystics and skeptics, the return of the village atheist zeitgeist refuted is Jesus and astrological myth, and biblical logic in theory and practice. He also serves as a lecturer and regular contributor to the American Vision website which he joined the staff of in June of 2008. Joel and his wife and three sons live in Dallas Georgia. Bill I’m going to let you say hello to Joel.

Bill: Joel, again I’d like to welcome you and get you started on some of the things we want to talk about. I would also like to mention that Joel — did you mention the how to argue with liberals book? Was that on there?

Brian: I’m sorry that was not in that bio but I would love to hear all about it.

Bill: Well we’ll let Joel…

Brian: I guess that’s a full-time gig.

Bill: We’ll let Joel say hi and there we’ll jump into that.

Brian: Okay groovy.

Joel: How are you doing guys, I’m glad to be on your show? I was going to naturally append the books I’ve written since that biography was written; one of them was God versus socialism which is probably a little bit more on topic today and that sold very well. And the other one of course is — I edited a volume that we titled, How to Argue with a Liberal and Win and that was a compilation of essays that was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education way back in 1962 and then again in 1970. And I took that, and of course it was not copy written, they didn’t want that, they wanted us to get the information out and so I said hey, can I republish this book, update all the facts and figures, and some of the names and places, and put it out with a new title? And they said sure, as long as you give us attribution and so that’s what I did and that the cats proven to be a very popular work as well, so how to argue with in the liberal and when.

Bill: Well when we get to move toward the end or toward a break we’ll tell people how they can get a hold of those books — those are important books, Joel does great work and he’s a rising star and a great young thinker which is what we need if we’re going to get out of the situation that we’re in now. We’re going to do it not from the top down as we always say, but we’re going to do it from the ground up and we have to educate people one at a time so that we can build a little better world from that direction. So Joel today we’ve decided that want to talk about God, guns, and gold and other tripartite that’s near and dear to your heart.

Joel: Yeah, politics and religion, if we just added sex, would offend everybody right?

Bill: Exactly, exactly and we always talk about — if you can’t talk about those things, it almost makes life — I know Europeans, remember Brian — Peter down in Belize was saying, you know to a European you never talk about these things. Well what, I think like what do Europeans talk about when they go have, or are there like, oh that wine tastes good or those drapes are beautiful or…

Joel: Floorboards, I think I heard one, a friend of mine from Europe one-time comment on the floorboards of a place.

Bill: Yeah, I mean I would not want to live in Europe if that’s the case so…

Brian: Joel, you sound like a guy that likes to mix it up like when I hear Bill say here’s the three things we’re not allowed to talk about, that’s what Bill and I always gravitate to and it’s not going to sound and it sounds just from the little bit I’ve known you that you’re of that same ill.

Joel: Yeah, I like to push the boundaries especially among the pious and it gets attention and introduce topics that are considered taboo like talking about guns in a church sermon and when people find out some of the historical background and religious ties to it they’re actually their eyes opened up, they get interested, they think wait a minute this is this is the America I grew up to love and how come all of a sudden we shouldn’t talk about these things so I love to push those boundaries.

Bill: Those are important considerations Joel and I think the thing that we like to talk about most here especially is, we have sort of a control grid that exists and whether it’s created top-down from government or whether it’s sort of self-imposed down from you know from our own psyches in our own dumb downed psyches, there’s some things and some reference points that are just off the table now, so if you go to talk to somebody Brian when you go to talk to Snooki or Lindsay you just can’t — some of these things just to have any — they don’t make any sense because there’s just not — they haven’t been educated in terms of the history of our country so…

Brian: Joel were just kind of chuckling here because Bill knows the one way to get me going is to ask me to comment on Lindsay or Snooki or whatever — I can hear Jeramy laughing in the background but he did sing to me.

Bill: There are things that Americans feel comfortable talking about but let’s go back lives get in the time capsule because this is where Joel has done a lot of his work. Let’s go get in the time capsule and we’ll do a little bit of comparing and contrasting and those three areas — the God guns and gold, so let’s — where would you like to start Joel?

Joel: Well, I’d put those in that order for a reason mainly because God is by far the most important, he’s the one that teaches us about the value of person and property and of course he’s the one that created the person and property so you know that’s the reference point for all of it. In that tri-part division I begin with Jefferson’s phrase in the Declaration of Independence where he appeals to the laws of nature and of nature’s God and of course says, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that life liberty and the pursuit of happiness when you trace the pedigree of that thought it goes back to John Locke and really also to William Blackstone but ultimately to Locke. And even though Locke was usually considered and Enlightenment figure, someone who is not considered a devout Christian, even when you read his treatise on government that Jefferson adapted that phrase from you see some very clear religious ideas that can only be thought of as Christian. And you know he says being all equal and independent knowing not to harm another in his life health liberty or possessions. In fact, I liked Locke’s language better because he talks about possessions that in state instead of or estate instead of happiness, you get something more concrete in there. But here’s a quotation that really drives home the religious aspect and I always have to consider this — to include this when I talk about these topics and this is from his two treatises on civil government the second one, “everyone as he is bound to preserve himself so by the like reason when his own preservation comes not in competition he ought as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind.” Okay actually that’s not the quotation I was looking for, called…

Brian: I liked that one for what it’s worth, I like that one.

Joel: It is great, that is emphasizing the protection of person. Now I’ve got ahead of myself here let’s back up a little bit, “being equal all independent knowing not to harm either in their life health liberty or possessions. For men being all the workmanship of one omnificent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one’s sovereign master sent into the world by his order about his business they are his property whose workmanship they are made to last during his and not another’s pleasure.” That definition of what God does is far beyond what Locke is usually accused of being a Deist. Well that’s not Deist language, a Deist God is someone who winds up the world and leaves it to run by laws. This description is a God who is sovereign, he is involved, he has a business, he has purpose you know he creates, and he endures and he relates and he has pleasure in that. So there is a definite conception of a creator and a sustaining and ordered God laying behind the tradition out of which Jefferson writes. Now of course we know Jefferson had some bugaboos about religion.

Brian: Hey Joel, when we come back after the break let’s focus a couple seconds on those bugaboos and then I want to get right into some of our other topics for discussion. We are going to take a quick break, come on back to offthegridnews.com, the radio version of our newsletter.

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Brian: Welcome back once again to offthegridnews.com the radio version of our show I’m Brian Brawdy here with Mr. Bill Heid and today Joel McDurmon. Joel I want to get right to it we were talking as we went into the break, some of the little hiccups in Jeffersonian thought and then I know you’re going to get into tyranny and liberty as well so go ahead and take it away.

Joel: Exactly, and we can talk about Jefferson’s religion all they we know that he was not what we consider an Orthodox Christian but he was very keen on certain biblical stories and these are what are very important for the American tradition. I like to tell this story, several months ago I got to visit Monticello and go through his house and there was a portrait of John Locke in his parlor where he spent much of his time and I was very keen to look for religious paintings and through the entire mansion, it’s more of a large house that there was only one religious painting. And this stood up to me; it was a copy of a well-known painting of Herodius, Aaron’s wife bearing the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And that was one of Jefferson’s favorite stories in the Bible was this idea of a tyrant king who would not heed the voice of moral law. If you remember the story of course John the Baptist told Herod it is wrong to commit adultery and that ended his head on a platter so a long story short, Jefferson had a keen link between the morals taught in the Bible, the values that came out of the Christian society and the idea of a free society, free of tyranny. In fact, when it came time to develop a seal, an official seal for the United States of America, he and Franklin, the two most irreligious guys in the group collaborated on a seal that actually portrayed the Israelites being delivered from the tyranny of Egypt across the Red Sea. And the tyrants, the Army being drowned in the Red Sea and it had an inscription that read, “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” so there’s this emphasis on the value of freedom and particularly in that is the value of resistance against tyranny. And that naturally leads to a defensive person and a defensive property. And what do you do for those two things? Well the founding fathers started with that premise that we are to protect ourselves from the potential powers of government and the ways you do that in person are certainly one way is through arms, through militia and the second is through protecting your property just through hard assets, it is you know estate it is for purposes of this talk gold. So that’s where I get the tripartite God guns and gold is the three get together naturally if you’re going to have a free society, you have to have those three foundations.

Bill: You know Joel, this is Bill again and I wanted to mention another one of Jefferson’s little quirks. In his, you know, as you said he has quite the reputation for being Deist, but just to give you an idea of the world that he lived in, he did live in a Christian world. He actually wanted to sell at some point I believe it was during his presidency, he wanted to sell 60,000 acres in Virginia to raise the money to buy Calvin’s Academy that existed in Geneva at the time. It was sometime later obviously, Calvin was long gone but the school was still there. And he wanted to sell; I mean this was hard documentation of the papers that are there for that, that he wanted to sell 60,000 acres in Virginia in order to create a Christian school, college in Washington. So Jefferson’s not the only, I mean he’s — didn’t live consistently inside that world, I think we tend to sort of say that he has to be the perfect Deist and he was not a perfect Deist he was you know kind of all over the place. But the side that you’ve mentioned was very real, the Christian side and the idea of the morals was very real. He saw genuine value in that.

Joel: Absolutely, I think he did.

Bill: Well where do you want to go now? Do you want to talk about you know who owns us and Locke, you had mentioned the statement and I was shocked to find out from Locke that the government does not own me. Here I thought, I mean as I peruse my Internet with my little laptop  and everywhere I’m inundated with the idea that government owns me, my family, my land, my guns all of those things. What’s a way of thinking, you know what’s the way of thinking that the colonial, the early colonial leaders had about what the nature of government was compared to what we have now? It seems to me that there’s this tension between God as Locke would say God owning or being the sovereign Creator of all things and then the government itself sort of saying progressively throughout history even during colonial times, I want to own you.

Joel: Yeah, big government and socialistic ideas are by definition anti-God, they are atheistic conceptions because they take the place of the very claims of God. In our founding fathers and coming from the whole tradition of John Locke who was raised in a Puritan family going through William Blackstone and the common law which is filled with quotations from the Bible which by the way was the basic Law textbook that every lawyer in the United States at the time read during the period of our founding. These guys all believed that the rights that they enumerated, live, health, liberty, possessions were natural rights that is in the view of their Christian faith, Christian created rights. Rights that are given by God not by man. They can certainly be infringed by man and that was the whole reason for the government system that they set up. They realized the tyrannical aspirations in the heart of every man and certainly those in positions of power to exercise kraft and subtlety and tyranny over their fellow man. And so they created a form of government specifically designed to counteract the effects of original sin. And that was a government that itself that had its hands tied by constitutional rights. It does not create those rights; the government is forced by the people to recognize those rights that are given by God to begin with. That is the fundamental difference; we are taught today that government gives us rights, now some senator or congressman said the other day said you know healthcare is now established as a right because they pass this monstrosity bill. No, that’s not a fact. If healthcare is a right as given by God it is not given by government so you know…

Brian: Joel you mean yesterday when the Congressman Stark said hey, for whatever it’s worth, the federal government can just do whatever it wants, you mean that wasn’t true? I shouldn’t run with that sound bite.

Joel: Sadly, in a sense in a practical sense it is true it does get away with anything it wants to do and it can pretty much do it without much of an outcry although we are seeing a lot larger outcry these days the more it takes. But in terms of right, in terms of law, certain moral law, God’s law, it can’t do anything it wants to, it has a very tiny limited sphere of things it should be doing.

Brian: We’ve got about a minute left Joel and then I know Bill had a quick question and then we’ll go to break and then when we come back, I’d like to discuss the Second Amendment. There was a great post back in June that you did on the Supreme Court affirms gun rights and I think that we’d like to get into that as well. Bill a quick question before we go to break?

Bill: Well this is kind of a comment and a question for Joel to and I guess I’m thinking the way that this statement that the Congressman made really encapsulates the road to tyranny. It certainly must have been what the zeitgeist was among the colonials as they looked at the British Parliament at the same time where the basic concept is, you can’t bind us, we don’t bind us, we are God law emanates from us ergo we are God is where it turns out to be they are as — as Joel said Brian, appropriating God’s place by saying you can’t touch us.

Joel: Absolutely.

Brian: Absolutely, and I think that as more and more people, certainly our listeners begin to spread that kind of message of what’s going on, it just makes me go yuck! You know sometimes it’s just like blah.

Joel: Yeah, I want to make a comment on that after we come back from the break too.

Brian: Alright, we’re going to go ahead, Joel thank you very much and look at that he mastered the video — he’s producing the show all the way from Dallas Georgia. We’re going to go ahead and go to a quick break, don’t forget come on back to offthegridnews.com.

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Brian: That’s a tough one to talk over. Welcome back once again to Off the Grid News, the radio version of our show. I’m Brian Brawdy here as always with Mr. Bill Heid and today a very special guest Joel McDurmon. Joel you were saying right as we went in to the break about you know our good friend representative Stark and how the federal government can do just about anything in this day and age, please talk me off the fence, talk me off the ledge.

Joel: Well I don’t know if I can talk you off the ledge, you may want to jump when I get done.

Brian: Thanks, my friend be careful, I have a history of that in my family but that’s another show Joel thanks so much for calling.

Joel: You’ll have to call in another expert for that one I’m afraid. But to the point of what he was saying, the attitude that we’re the government and we’re the ones in control, you know all that kind of stuff. There was a great article that just came out, you guys have probably seen it, the American Spectator- on America’s ruling class is by Angelo Codevilla and it’s a very long article but man he goes through piece by piece talking about basically the rise of this attitude since the progressive Era and personally I would take it back earlier than that but since the progressive Era he just nailed what’s happened to politics in America and just the rise of this class that thinks they’re the ones in control, they’re the ones they’ll tell us how to live, they’re here to save us. It was fused with liberal religion that denied original sin, have adapted to Darwinism and is essentially saying we now need a system of government to improve man based on those presuppositions. So naturally, instead of limited government your guy have big government and that was that grew directly out of the progressive era which by the way was dominated by Republicans and that’s often forgotten.

Bill: Yeah, and that’s a Rockefeller mentality and, you know oddly enough as I understand it and I think that says you were saying Joel that’s post-colonialism without God as it sort of…

Joel: That’s exactly what it is, which is Galianism it goes that far back but if you want a segway to guns, the story comes right out of that era in I believe it was in 1902 or 03. It was just after the Spanish-American war there was a lot of propaganda about how the state militias were not properly prepared to handle a war like that which was a inferiorlistic war to begin with so the Secretary of War under McKinley was a man named and he was connected to every big business and banking Corporation you can imagine and it was his idea to centralize federal control over the military and instead of having state militia, have one standing army. And out of that came a series of things including the. Immediately after that within 10 years the budget for the military went through the roof, they spent more on the military in about 10 years after the act than they had in the entire history of the United States before. And as a result you have this large standing military, which was the exact same thing the founding fathers feared most and why they penned the Second Amendment that Americans should be armed so that you can read this in the Federalist papers particularly 46 so that the people are armed, the government can’t overrun the people and therefore it will be different than the military establishments in the kingdom of Europe, what of course they had to mind Napoleon and things like — well I guess they wouldn’t have had Napoleon, it would have been the French Revolution. But the whole idea of the standing military, they were terrified of it in even the most centralized government minded among them you could say was Hamilton. Even he was afraid of a standing army and he proposed even though he wanted greater central control over the militias and standardize training and things like that in Federalist 29 he said, this is the only way that we can have a substitute to withstand a standing army, the best possible security against it. So the founding fathers were terrified of a standing army. What is the outcome? You’re starting to see a lot of resistance movements across the United States, you see talks of secession you see a lot of talk of nullification, you see the Arizona law being challenged, you see I think it was Virginia to just come out and said the same thing policed can check — you’re seeing a lot of resistance to federal ideas. What happens if that comes down to a contest, where the court, Supreme Court overturns those laws and the state says forget it, we’re going to do it anyway as the sheriff in Arizona is doing. You know, what happens ultimately, well I mean God forbid this happen in modern times will ultimately it comes down to a contest of force. Who can enforce their laws the best, well if the federal government has a large standing army it certainly has the advantage, it can impose its will. In that scenario there is no escape from this large progressivist leftist takeover of the nation. You have to decentralize the military and that the arms back at more local control than they are. If you don’t, there’s really no escape in my opinion so that is a long discussion is a whole lot of hype to a lot of questions to come out of it but ultimately that is what the Second Amendment was about was decentralizing power and keeping the power in the hands of the people.

Bill: And that’s been changed so radically, I remember when I was in school, this was in the 70s Joel and I made a point in class about the Second Amendment and I just said that the Second Amendment — that I had read you know a modicum of founders material around you know what was some of the surrounding documents. I wasn’t very educated when I was in school, public school and I said it seems to me to my teacher and to — I’ll never forget the guy that ended up being the valedictorian of the class was there to and I said it seems to me like they wanted people to have guns so that they could pick them up and shoot people who were tyrants. And I’ll never forget my teacher and the valedictorian turned on me like Garr… like the pit bull and they were shocked that I could even come to that conclusion. I mean you talk about a grid; there was a matrix — a control grid there where you’ve got a controlled education where we’re only going to teach these snippets…

Joel: Absolutely.

Bill: And they’re tightly packed and carefully controlled but how can you not come to a conclusion about the Second Amendment that those people didn’t have guns so that they could not tyrants with them. I mean an idiot could read…

Joel: That’s why education especially in the public schools never includes, I should say rarely includes covering primary sources. I mean I went through all public schools, I was never assigned to read the Federalist papers and I was certainly not assigned to read the anti-Federalist papers who were the real heroes of the time. And so you would never learn this stuff, you don’t read their letters you don’t the writings of the founding fathers, you are told what to believe about the founding fathers by establishment committees to write a textbooks. So yeah, you’ve got to get through that grid, you know I was just thinking as you were telling the story of that teacher you know there was a, it comes out of a classical studies I think it is that said, who guards the guardians? You know that’s always a question who governs the government, who protects us from them. Well akin to that in modern times this is the question who teaches the teachers, you know because you have these teachers whose teaching students — will early in this whole progressive Era when they were making large strides to taking over the education establishment one of the central things they did was to establish curriculum for teachers and to have teachers training, their methods — there are limits on what they teach, there are limits on how they teach and things like that. They are just as controlled as the students are and of course they think they are the ones teaching the students and they’re really not, they’re not educated themselves.

Bill: One of the things Gary North use to call that he thought they were so highly leveraged Joel, he always called them transmission belts because you know they were the key. If you could go capture these transmission belts there and at the seminary level you could transform a nation and they certainly have.

Joel: Absolutely and thank God I mean look at the Internet as just destroying the transmission belt.

Brian: In some ways, I’m thinking some ways, in other ways the inverse would also be true, you know thanks to websites as I mentioned in your bio like American Vision where you know there are a lot of people out there left screaming, you know the voice in the wilderness going, look it’s not what you think.

Joel: Absolutely, you’re destroying the power of their transmission also at the same time we’re establishing our own lines of communication to the truth so I mean it’s just a wonderful tool, a powerful tool — people are picking it up and I think a lot of the reactions you’re seeing, the tea party movement and unrest like that in many different ways, I think a lot of it is spurred on by this huge decentralization of knowledge and a sensibility of it.

Brian: And Joel I want to get to that and I’ve got one other kind of like a personal question about the Second Amendment as well when we come back after the break so stick around, this is a segment you’re going to want to hear.

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Brian: Welcome back once again to offthegridnews.com and the radio version of our show offthegridnews.com radio. We have a very special guest here today, Joel McDurmon and Joel I just want to ask you a quick question I mean how many times Bill do you get to hang out with someone that has a Masters in Divinity, you know what I mean, like we could go out there and I could talk to him…

Bill: Well you know I hang around with it kind of people all the time.

Brian: Well you know for me, if you don’t mind one quick personal question and then Jeramy… will you stop bringing up Snooki I’m going to come straight across the table. Alright but that, talk about being armed, here’s the question I have Joel. From being back a little boy and now when I look over my art collection and some of the other things; I have probably a half a dozen paintings and a half a dozen statues, different renditions of the Angel Michael.

Joel: Okay.

Brian: And for me, the second amendment, the ability to keep and bear arms, when I look at any of those renditions Michael is always, whether it is ceramic or a painting — always armed with a sword. So from the youngest moments that I can remember looking at those it just seemed to me natural that the second amendment, the individual’s ability to be armed and to protect themselves and to cut away those things that don’t work — to me I just look at the Michael statue in my office and it makes perfect sense. Am I wrong?

Joel: No, I think there’s no problem with that at all, I mean God expects us to value life, he expects us to value other people’s property as well as your own and through those means to take dominion so if we don’t protect life through, if necessary arms then are we really loving our neighbor? Personally I don’t think so. A lot of people unlike you have a different image that they seen all their lives of Jesus, you probably seen this one too by the way. He’s always be rosy cheeked shepherd usually holding a lamb sometimes with his fingers outstretched and he always has this distant gaze in his eye he has long blonde hair and blue eyes you know. They have this rosy Jesus, I don’t even know the words for it, sweet loving gentle Jesus and you know you never see pictures in the Jesus junk shops, you never see Jesus turning over the money changers tables. You never see him calling downdraft on the Pharisees, you never see the Jesus of manliness so to speak of Jesus that worked in fishing boats during storms who walked barefoot along the seaside helping sort out fishing nets. You never see the manly side of Jesus and certainly in most Christian imagery you don’t see that with the portraits of you know Michael the Archangel either. But you’re right, it’s there, there is a whole different side of our religious knowledge that has not been emphasized certainly not in modern times. So yeah, you’re right to make that connection and I don’t know why more people are not introduced to it very early.

Brian: Well I guess that I was just fortunate that I had a martial arts instructor when I was very young said to me one time that compassion is only compassion when it has teeth. And there are just those times when to defend yourself or to someone else, you’ve got to have a little more teeth so I thank you for that, that’s my little 15 minutes with an expert but I’ve always looked at Michael and just don’t oh, it makes perfect sense to me that we have the right to keep and bear arms. If it’s good enough for Michael, it’s good enough for us.

Joel: True we might get wings too then, I don’t know.

Brian: Maybe in my next life Joel.

Bill: You don’t have wings?

Brian: I don’t have wings, no, no, no.

Bill: I’ve never looked.

Brian: Yeah, you know and I’m thinning up top too, so I’d like wings, hair and a sword and I’ll be great. Alright, but I’ve noticed that long enough. Joel I’d like to get into the third part and I’m going to toss it to Bill because I know it’s a passion that you both share, Bill…

Bill: Well I’m interested in gold as you are Joel and I think for me the interest in gold came very early and we can bring this forward to what the founding fathers thought. If you read the Bible and you see the word weight or weights and measures, there is a constant reminder that it drives God nuts to be cheated and that means to be cheating with a scale, to be cheating with a currency as I’d like you to speak about the any time in the Bible it was money was a weight, was a not?

Joel: Absolutely it was always considered a substance and of course you’re right there’s not much substance to a piece of paper or especially when it’s only a fractional reserve piece of paper. The law is thou shall not steal, there are many case laws all through the Bible built on bad and one of them is weights and measures and God emphasizes over and over again both in the law of Moses and in the Proverbs as well as in the Gospels that you don’t take her with the weights and measures, it is a form of lying, it is a form of stealing. And of course that has been mankind’s temptation all through history. The ancient Romans did it they debased their coins thereby tinkering with the value. The same thing has happened in the Middle Ages, the whole idea of fractional reserve banking goes back I believe to the Knights Templers who would, you know when they came back from the Crusades, you had a bunch of these burly soldiers who had no way else of making a living and so they hired themselves out as security guards and that grew into the idea of being kind of an armored transport service. And they began taking in people’s valuables in a sense being a bank. The next thing they started making loans on stuff they held as collateral and loans against it anyway. And then when they realized they could do that nobody was going to come and try to take out the Templers and get their gold well then they realized you know, I can loan out allegedly more than I have got in stock and I can draw interest own huge sums of money that I really don’t have but nobody’s taking it out anyway so… that’s to me that from what I read the origins of modern centralized fractional reserve banking. It’s a form of lying, you’re drawing interest on money you don’t own and it’s the bedrock of our financial system today and that’s why it’s about to collapse.

Bill: I know Luther wrote extensively about that issue of stealing and his interests were in protecting the poor that he wrote extensively on the debilitating issues of inflation at the time that he was living; I mean this is not a new problem. This is a problem during Luther’s time and he saw God’s law as something to hold up as a plumb line to say, no don’t go there, you can’t go there whether you’re a whether you know you’re King’s, democracies it doesn’t matter who it is, it’s just you can’t steal.

Joel: Yeah it’s a basic thing and we find a man kind I should say has found 1000 ways to pretend it doesn’t exist or pretend they’re obeying it when they are not or to just outright ignore it. But it is, a very simple command that’s why the 10 Commandments were written, to put those laws into very simple easy to understand formats where the farmers and the poor can understand it and come to the government to redress grievances. The problem becomes when the government is the one that’s printing the money. You said this was a biblical theme and it is and there is a great place where God uses this as a metaphor and it’s in the first chapter of Isaiah and just let me read a couple of versus if you don’t mind. From the 21st chapter or the 21st verse on at the first chapter it says, “how is the faithful city become a harlot, it was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers, thy silver is become draus by wine mixed with water and your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves, everyone loves gifts and follows after rewards and they don’t judge the fatherless and they don’t judge the and they don’t bring the cause of the widow before the…” that idea of the Silver becoming draus is the whole idea of Jesus valuing what was valuable and God was using that as a metaphor to talk about our sin, of course it works both ways. It is our sinful temptations, our sinful desires that lead us, when I say us I’m talking about certainly the ones in power.

Bill: Well the founders, I was just going to say real quick Joel, that the founders had that vision when they came here, it was not that they could always live in terms of it because they went up and down with currencies as well but they did when they came in when they formed the Constitution had an original idea of, you know we’re not going to steal, is that correct?

Joel: Yeah I think you’re right like I said earlier our Constitution was a document designed with original sin in mind and they knew the corrupt part of mankind especially when in positions of power. And so they designed a document that tied the hands of government except in essential functions of operating courts for the redress grievances for places where people would break those sins, those laws and common everyday life. So the whole idea was to limit the government from it and yet to protect the law, protect the moral values that built this nation from the earliest colonies up.

Bill: Well then the government can print up dollars they can clip coins like they did during Roman times and even before that, but they can’t print up more gold. They can steal gold, obviously that was a popular sport as well but, let’s…

Joel: A popular sport…

Bill: It’s like deep-sea fishing, you know but what have people done to hedge their wealth and I know this is sort of a segway into gold but I think you know gold from my understanding has had the same — gold could buy the same number of — an ounce of gold could buy the same number of loaves of bread back in Nebuchadnezzar’s day as it does today. So you don’t really make a lot of money with gold but as a stored value and as a hedge against government, governments stealing gold has been the go to Silver to a lesser, gold has been the go to metal.

Joel: Yeah there are many reasons people buy gold I think the best ones are what you just described. Is there to conserve my wealth in a physical state that the government can’t depreciate unless it forcefully robs it from you which has been known to happen in the past but yeah it’s a — you call it a stored value, I’m careful with that term but it is something in which I can conserve my value without the state stealing it and you know a lot of people a lot of people are always waiting around to buy gold when it drops to a lower price whatever, they think they’re going to profit from it and I think that that’s a misguided way of looking at it. The point is not — you’re not going to profit from gold in terms of US dollars, the point is to get your wealth into a form that is stable and that will be there 1000 years from now you know if you hold onto it and pass it on to your kids. A good example is, we always point back to the Byzantine era, the Empire depending on who you ask of course lasted about 1000 to 1100 years. During that time it was the gold standard coinage, gold and during that 1100 year period there was unprecedented price stability in the Empire. What somebody ball in 330 A.D. they could buy in 1300 A.D. for the same price. Now if you compare that with what’s happening to the US dollar in a mere hundred years it’s astounding.

Bill: That is astounding.

Brian: That is.

Bill: Well what should people do now? We’ve got a short period of time left and I wanted to introduce the idea of the gold manual you’ve written and that we’re going to start to marketing it and is located at nomoregoldscams.com. Do you want to talk a little bit about that book?

Joel: Yeah it was something I’ve wanted to do when you mentioned it to me, there is so much — what’s the word, there so much interest in buying gold today and yet there so many ways you can be ripped off. Well I should say there’s a few ways that you can really get ripped off that are very persuasive and there’s just so many ins and outs to the market that I’m number one wanted to study it and learn it all myself and then wanted to use what little talent I had to sit down and write it for the benefit of someone else. And so that’s what I’ve done, I’ve talk to the experts, I’ve been all over books, articles old and new, I’ve read the laws, I’ve read tax codes, I read everything you can imagine pertaining to gold and I put this into a form of this manual that you were discussing called, “The Gold Buyers Survival Manual” and I think the results — well up front some of the lessons in here could save you thousands of dollars on your first purchase of gold and of course in that way would pay for itself many times over. But the knowledge that compiled in here, you will not find anywhere in a single place like this certainly not.

Brian: And so I’ll say you know just how to buy or how to save money buying any type of gold or the exact coins to own if you anticipate bartering for other commodities. I was driving somewhere last week, Bill I forget what state I was in but there was a big billboard up about it — hey we barter so something like that would be a way to keep your gold liquid while remaining completely secure or how to take advantage of market movements like an insider. Those are all great topics and all contained in your book.

Joel: Yeah I don’t talk about how to take advantage of the market movements so much, I am more concerned about like I said earlier just the store value rather than the speculation aspect of it. But it is a viable topic but I just want people to be aware of the potential scams out there, aware of the different ways to buy gold, aware of the safest ways to own gold, if you won’t gold. You know I make an assumption you know when you buy gold, you want to pay for gold, you don’t want to pay for someone else’s promise that they will give you gold at some point in the future. You don’t want to pay for a piece of paper that says you own gold after all that our federal reserve notes started out. You don’t want any second party or third-party in between you and the gold and so I cover all the bases, I show you all the ins and outs and everything in between those two things. And show you all the different ways that you can be ripped off and hopefully point the person who’s reading this in the direction of making the best value investment in the safest way possible for conserving their wealth.

Bill: One of the things, Joel that can’t be appreciated as well right now in this current climate, we’re in the summer and we do this interview and gold always comes down in the summer so gold seems to be reasonably priced, this is not a, we’re not trying to give you investment advice here you should find someone that knows what they’re talking about for investment, for all the times you need investment advice, get it from a pro. But what I would say just historically is when you have what to me looks like we’re on the precipice of what’s going to be a lot of paper printing which it’s going to translate into someone’s going to pay for these social programs and our military and all of these things. So if you see gold moving from you to 1200 and something to where it is today and it starts going to 14, 18, 22 — the things that Joel was talking about many advisers by the way are saying that gold will go to $5-$10,000 an ounce which is another way of saying that the dollar will shrink down to the fact that it takes 10,000 pieces of paper to get that but as you see that what happens is you get bubbles and frenzies, bubbles and frenzies are in the news now because we still understand real state that’s still well in our minds, it’s a recent event and so that same thinking happened with gold and as it does the scams and the rip-offs as we say all of those guys will come out from underneath the rocks and they will be everywhere so…

Joel: Yeah and they are by definition salesmen, their job is to sell you a product they have whether it’s some kind of collectible coin or something like that and they are very good salesman so you need to know the things they’re going to tell you to scare you away from buying a conservative investment in just gold bullion coins. And you know even if you ultimately decide to agree with them, you owe to yourself just to be educated and I think when you receive the education you’ll see things differently. Yeah and that’s one reason what you just mentioned that I like to emphasize as the conservation aspect of buying gold for conserving wealth. Our main goal may go to 5000 in the future however the likelihood is I don’t know but if it does a lot of people are going to watch it going up over time and they’re going to say you know what I’m going to wait for it to come back down so I can buy a cheaper and if you do that you will never buy gold. So the point is to buy now, buy as early as you can and buy as much as you can at certain times. And get your money in a safe place, now and of course this manual will educate you before you make any potential mistakes along the way.

Bill: And let me also comment that the reason you want to buy gold is — and it’s a constant theme, there is a storm coming, we have a nation that is broke beyond repair, we have Europe that is broke beyond repair. A lot of our money is in their banks and we’ll fall and start a trigger. We have cities that have the money that are broke beyond repair, we have municipalities and states that have no money here in Illinois, we are broke beyond repair. So ladies and gentlemen there is no way out of this other than for you to take decisive action for you and your family and that’s why you probably need to have some hard assets to protect against the storm that’s coming — that the storm is coming, I don’t know whether it will be a deflationary period first or that giant sucking sound will be a bunch of banks going under and then they’ll do just what helicopter Ben suggested, they will launch their planes and they will dump currently from out of planes until gold goes to whatever, who knows as Joel would say, who knows what number it could be. But that’s what, there’s no politically feasible way out by saying let’s do some cutbacks.

Joel: Oh absolutely not, you’re seeing that all of the place right now, people laying off, so many police officers and firemen but I mean those are just nipping at the edges of the real problem and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The debts are so high is going to be a drastic measure which personally I think this whole security issue is going to eclipse all of it and personally I think they’re going to confiscate IRA accounts which is one reason I wouldn’t put, hold gold in an IRA but that’s a whole different story, it’s discussed in the book so… yeah I mean there’s, there are problems on the horizon there are possible bank failures and there’s only one person who profits during a bank run and it’s the person who gets there first. The banks not the last and the people who get there late are not going to last so you know by now.

Brian: Joel thank you so much time or going to go ahead and run the hopefully for a future show you can go ahead and come back on, I thought Bill we could have taken time with Joel in any of those three topics and just gone on an hour or something…

Bill: We could do a week’s worth of shows on any of those topics but yeah, make sure you go to AmericanVision.com and make sure you check out Joel’s writings, they’re very important writings.

Joel: That’s right AmericanVision.org is our content site, AmericanVision.com is our store where you can buy all of our books and DVDs including God, Guns and Gold.

Brian: Groovy you can go to AmericanVision.com and AmericanVision.org. Joel, thank you so very much. Ladies and gentlemen we been with Mr. Joel McDurmon, he has a Masters in Divinity from The Reformed Episcopal Theological Seminary and is the director of research for American Vision. We’re going to go ahead and run, thank you so very much, before I let you go please remember as always to send us your e-mails at [email protected]. From time to time Bill will read those e-mails own hair, also you’re welcome to join us at www.offthegridnews.com, of course you can find is that twitter at offgridradio and on Facebook, facebook.com/solutionsfromscience. On behalf of Bill Heid, Jeramy’s here as well, the entire staff at Solutions From Science until next time, I’m Brian Brawdy.